Back in the day, before Boy Scout first-aid manuals, a favorite way to staunch severe bleeding was to draw a red-hot poker from the fire and apply it to the open wound.
Cauterization was quick, but very painful. Sometimes it even worked.
The boldest political move of the week belongs to Lee May, the 39-year-old interim CEO of troubled DeKalb County. On Wednesday, May announced the hiring of former attorney general Mike Bowers to conduct a no-holds-barred investigation of corruption and malfeasance within county operations.
DeKalb is bleeding confidence. And Bowers is the red-hot poker.
Aside from the indictments, the confessions, the forced removals from office, the most obvious product of that bleeding has been a cityhood movement that threatens to carve what once was Georgia’s showpiece county into a handful of Latvias, Lithuanias and Estonias.
One day after he announced his hiring of Bowers, May drew the line between his gamble and the cityhood movement.
“It’s confidence in our government, that we’re open and transparent, and that we’re an ethical government. That’s what this is really intended to address,” May said in an interview. “The greater confidence that people have in our county, the more they’ll want to stick with us – and have their services delivered by county government versus other, smaller, maybe more silo-ed versions of local government.”
This week should tell us whether the 2015 slate of DeKalb cityhood bills will survive a final push through the General Assembly. The three in question have passed the House and are in the hands of the Senate.
Republicans in control of the saga say the city of Stonecrest in south DeKalb will survive only if LaVista Hills and Tucker rise up in the north. But like alpha wolves at an Alaskan beast feast, supporters of LaVista Hills made a Thursday committee raid on Tucker’s proposed boundaries, gobbling up 2,000 more residents.
Which risks an additional round of House-Senate negotiations to settle the matter.
Not unreasonably, May is betting on chaos in the Legislature.
“You never know what’s going to happen in the General Assembly. We’ve had cityhood measures before,” the interim CEO said. A years’ delay would give Bowers time to make an impact.
“His work is a minimum of 120 days. That’s four months. It won’t be done before the end of session. But if it delivers a message that we’re serious about dealing with our issues in DeKalb, we’re better for it,” May said.
In certain areas of solidly Democratic DeKalb, Bowers may not be a popular choice. “Some people may not like the decision of bringing him in, particularly. But I said, ‘Look, this is not a popularity contest.’ This is not a vote for a Democrat or Republican on a ballot. It’s about someone who will come in and tell the truth,” May said.
But May needs more than someone who will tell the truth. He needs someone who will tell the truth and be believed by a certain category of DeKalb resident. And this is where Bowers’ Republican credentials become necessary.
May takes issue with me here. “People’s lack of confidence in our county government doesn’t rely simply on racial boundaries,” he said. “It’s black and white. So this speaks to north-south, east-west, Democrat-Republican, black or white DeKalb.”
At this point, you might question the wisdom of spending $400 an hour so that a modern-day, hard-shelled Diogenes can hunt out honest government. If those cityhood movements succeed, doesn’t that negate May’s reason for hiring Bowers?
The answer is that there are other kinds of bleeding that must be stopped.
It received little attention at the time, but late last year, May and some other DeKalb commissioners met with Chris Carr, head of the state Department of Economic Development.
Ostensibly, the reason for the get-together was a new marketing plan the county had developed for going after new businesses. But the conversation quickly shifted into come-to-Jesus territory, said Carr, himself a resident of DeKalb.
“It doesn’t make sense that DeKalb County wouldn’t be a part of this burgeoning economy. But the reality of the situation is, there is only so much the state can do. The county is going to have to take care of its business,” Carr said. “You can’t have indictments, and you can’t have school boards getting removed, because companies can go any number of places.”
This was Carr’s bottom line: “The fact is, outside of Perimeter Center, of the projects that the state has been a part, there are very, very, very few where folks are looking at DeKalb.”
State bureaucrats don’t often employ the triple “very.” But in this Internet-driven age, job growth and reputation are closely linked. It is serious stuff. Tax bases are at stake. Which means schools are at stake, as well as every service a county is obliged to provide.
And that’s why Lee May has called for the red-hot poker.
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